Despite telephone industry improvement programs to provide coin telephone service innovations, the scheduling and collection of paystation coin boxes has to some degree been inefficient and costly. The scheduling procedure has proven deficient because inadequate information has been available on the coin box fill. High cost and inefficiency arise in the collection arrangements because many precautionary measures are used to safeguard against employee theft following the removal of the coin box from the paystation. These precautions are taken because there is insufficient accumulated data concerning the total amount of money in a collected box.
Heretofore, the telephone industry has resorted to integrity checking practices such as predepositing a number of different marked coins in selected coin boxes and then ascertaining the presence of such coins during coin counting operations. If any marked coin is found to be missing, it is determined that there is an integrity problem. Such practices obviously consume a substantial amount of personnel time and expenses.
In order to improve coin box collection scheduling and to provide limited protection against coin theft by employees, automatic coin station and central office facilities were recently designed for deriving precise data on the numbers and types of coins deposited in paystations. These facilities determine when coin boxes have been adequately filled and require collection. Such facilities are disclosed in a copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 819,244, filed July 27, 1977.
In accordance with that disclosure, a coin information processing arrangement is provided in which a coin telephone station is equipped with a coin box for storing deposited coins, a station memory for registering data signals for the station, and a memory control circuit that is responsive to a control signal for examining the memory to readout the registered data signals. To elaborate, each station is equipped with memories for three different types of coins, such as nickels, dimes and quarters, and with the memory control circuit which is responsive to signals received from a central office for sequentially interrogating the memories to effect a sending of the stored information to the central office during memory readout, coin collect and overtime deposit check operations. The central office facilities include a coin processor which cooperates with coin supervisory circuits to identify the calling station, to interrogate the memories at that station for the initial and overtime deposits needed for the continuation or termination of the call, and then to store the actual coin denominations for subsequent processing and correlation in connection with coin box collection scheduling.
Although the foregoing facilities are capable of determining when a coin box should be scheduled for collection based on accumulated coin box fill information, it has been a recognized problem that they are incapable of specifying the exact numbers and types of coins in that box when it is actually removed from the paystation. The problem arises because no means is provided in those facilities for automatically ascertaining and reporting when a coin box has actually been removed for coin collection. As a consequence, the prior art coin processor can determine at a centralized location that a station coin box should be collected because it is adequately filled and can specify that the box will contain minimum numbers of different types of coins. However, it cannot specify the exact amount of money which will be in the box when it is actually collected because time elapses between the decision to collect the box and its actual collection. During the elapsed time, many calls may be originated from the coin phone and additional money can be collected in the coin box. The prior art is incapable of accurately accounting for the additional money without knowing the exact time that the coin box is removed from the paystation phone. Resultingly, coin box theft can yet occur in the prior art systems.